Endless Frakking Wonder
by dragonchrysalis
Summary: A collection of 100 drabbles/oneshots, each centered around a theme. Prompts provided by the the 100 Themes Challenge list. Will be mostly Claudia, but all W13 characters will make an appearance. Rated T to be safe.
1. Introduction

Her introduction to the Warehouse was, in a word, overwhelming.

She deeply suspected it was that way for everyone – the curly-haired agent next to her, who she remembered was Myka, was wearing a sympathetic expression and seemed to be trying hard not to pat her on the shoulder. Wise choice on Myka's part, because if she had dared to touch Claudia at that precise moment, she would have been the recipient of a roundhouse kick faster than you could say "endless wonder".

Claudia didn't play well with others. That was what report card after report card had said, sent to one foster family or another over the years. Some of her families had been nice about it, telling her to just do her best and they'd love her anyway. Some families had been….not so nice. Claudia unconsciously rubbed the scars, forever gifts from the foster father who had taught her by example how to do a roundhouse kick.

It was funny, all those months she'd spent hacking into the Warehouse, trying to pinpoint its exact location, she'd dreamt about what it would look like. The images in her mind had varied wildly, but never once had she imagined _this_. It was exhilarating and terrifying and breathtaking all at once and it never, ever ended. The shelves stretched as far back as her eyes could see.

And she had never stopped to really consider what her _life_ would be like when she finally found the Warehouse. Somehow, in her mind, she thought that she would find the Warehouse and the rest of her life would somehow follow in a fashion. She had been so focused on freeing Joshua for so long, her own life had completely escaped her. Now Joshua was free, Joshua was _real_ and solid and reassuring. And the Professor – Artie – was making amends for abandoning her way back when. Artie was helping her. For the first time in twelve years, she felt like someone _wanted_ her.

"Well?" Artie's voice was in her ear. "How do you like it?" Claudia couldn't tear her eyes away from the view.

"It's perfect." She breathed. And though she'd done her share of lying over the past few years, this answer was entirely truthful. She was awestruck. In her heart, she knew then that this was the place for her, this incredible place full of endless wonder. This was where she would spend the rest of her life, and she couldn't think of anything better.


	2. Complicated

She hadn't meant to run out on Todd like that, honestly. It's just that he was freaking her out, all the questions about her past and how was she supposed to answer those? It's not like she could answer _honestly_. "My brother and only living relative was trapped in an interdimensional vortex and haunted me like a ghost so I thought I was crazy and checked myself into a mental hospital. Then I broke out of the mental hospital which may or may not have involved illegal hacking, became obsessed with finding a mystical warehouse full of supernatural artifacts, found the mystical warehouse, kidnapped the man who is now my boss and forced him to free my brother from the vortex. Now I work at the Warehouse and help hunt down things you never thought existed, not even in your wildest nightmares."

Yeah, right. If it hadn't been her life, _she _wouldn't have even believed it.

On the other hand, what possible lies could she come up with? As far as Todd knew, she worked at an IRS warehouse. Which, _please_, if she ever found herself _actually_ working at an IRS warehouse (hey, stranger things had happened, especially to her), someone needed to shoot her and put her out of her misery. She thought _inventory _was boring; it was nothing compared to archiving thousands and thousands of tax returns. She supposed she could hack herself a past, implant fake documents, the whole nine yards. It might be an idea worth considering. She'd hacked herself a GED when she was fifteen, after all.

It was all just so _complicated_. Her whole life was complicated. She might as well change her last name to "Complicated". Claudia Complicated. There was actually some nice alliteration there, come to think of it.

She wondered if this was why Warehouse agents tended to stay single. The complexity was making her head spin. Claudia Complicated Donovan. That's who she'd always been, from way back when. And it was the way she would always be.

_Oh well_, she decided. Simplicity was overrated anyway.


	3. Making History

A/N: Some spoilers for "No Pain, No Gain". This one was really hard to write, for some reason.

* * *

Claudia had done a lot of hard things in her life. In fact, one could argue that her whole life was one big "hard thing". But witnessing a robbery – a robbery that could have _killed_ someone – and being powerless to stop it was hard on a completely different level. If this wasn't the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life, it definitely made the top five.

The bracelet glittered, something that could have been written off as just a trick of the light. But deep in her psyche, Claudia felt a tug, a pull that brought her a few steps closer to the woman with the bracelet before she even realized her feet were moving. The newly created artifact was calling to her.

She wondered what this artifact would do, born out of such bravery and love. Mrs. Frederic had stopped her from the impulse to snag, bag, and tag. The artifact would remain out in the world – that is, of course, as long as it didn't act up, attracting attention of all the wrong kinds. Claudia closed her eyes, took a deep breath…

And gasped as a sudden onslaught of images overtook her brain. They came in fragments, one after another like rapid fire. A static bag. Two agents who moved with the easy familiarity of Pete and Myka. One of them dropping a bracelet – _this_ bracelet – into the bag. A shower of sparks. And a woman with a blue streak in her hair watching them. Smiling approvingly.

A hand on her shoulder broke her out of the trance. "Claudia?" Mrs. Frederic asked. Her eyes betrayed a subtle concern. Claudia shook her head.

"Fine. Just…I mean…was that….is that…..did I just…see the _future_?" Mrs. Frederic smiled enigmatically.

"You'll just have to wait to find out, won't you now?" She turned and started walking back to the limo, Claudia hurrying to keep up with her. As she walked, it occurred to her what she had witnessed. She was a part of history now, and someday, if her visions were any indication, she'd be Caretaker, telling her own agents about the mysterious bracelet, born out of a mother's love for her child.

_That_ was cool. Maybe she was ready for this Caretaker gig after all.


	4. Rivalry

A/N: You get two today because it took me so long to write "Making History"! I normally do NOT ship Myka/H.G, but I think the fandom's rabid enthusiasm for the ship might have rubbed off on me a teeny bit.

* * *

Okay, so maybe she had a teensy tiny sibling rivalry thing going on with Pete.

Sometimes they collaborated – replacing Myka's shampoo with green hair dye for St. Patrick's Day had been fun. Other times – most times – they pitted themselves against each other in an endless series of inane and sometimes unspoken bets. Who could get to the scones first? If they were on missions simultaneously – who could snag, bag, and tag their artifact the fastest? How long would it take for Myka and H.G to kiss?

That last one had an endless litany of sub-bets. Who would go for the kiss first? Who would break away first? Would it be at the Warehouse, or the bed and breakfast? And – most importantly – how long after the kiss would passionate, bed-breaking sex occur?

Artie knew about the bets, or at least most of them. Privately, Claudia thought that he made little bets of his own, in his head, but chose not to share them out of a stubborn desire to cling to the appearance of an old, grumpy, father figure. If he started joining in on Pete and Claudia's bets, someone might draw the mistaken conclusion that he was capable of having _fun._

Pete was her big brother in all, but blood. Though Joshua would always be her brother in blood, Josh was half a world away immersed in scientific research and a phone call once a month, barring any artifact emergencies, just wasn't the same. She hadn't even known that there were other brother shoes to fill until Pete came into her life. He wasn't a replacement for Josh – no one could ever replace Josh and if her desperate quest to bring him back from the unknown had proved anything, it was that. But he was a brother of a whole different flavor, the one who laughed and joked with her, bet on H.G and Myka with her. The one who baked her cookies just because he could, all the while warning her not to tell anyone that manly Pete Lattimer had quite an affinity for baking. The one who held her as she trembled from the nightmares and read to her from his favorite comic books until she was calm enough to go back to sleep. And the one, though he'd never spelled it out, who would move heaven and earth to protect her and make sure she was okay.

Sure, they had their share of sibling rivalry, and sure, they drove each other crazy sometimes. But the key word in that was _sibling_. For better, for worse, they were siblings, and would be for the rest of time.


	5. Unbreakable

A/N: Spoilers for the end of S3. Also, I fixed Chapter 2 so that it's not both Chapter 1 and 2 in one chapter. That was my mistake.

* * *

Claudia Donovan had always fancied herself unbreakable.

It was one of the things she had always prided herself on. Her parents were killed in a car accident – she didn't break. Her brother disappeared and it took her twelve years to get him back – she didn't break. She was tossed from foster family to foster family like a bag of rags that no one could find any use for – she didn't break. Even in the institution, through all the talk therapy and rec therapy and electroshock therapy, _therapy therapy therapy_, she never broke. A few cracks appeared here and there, but she clung tightly to the notion that nothing could make her shatter.

Until she saw her best friend's greying corpse slumped in a chair, with wide eyes that would see no more. He wasn't just her partner or just her best friend, though he was both of those, he was her _first _best friend. Her _only_ best friend. Even before Joshua had disappeared, she hadn't had many friends. Everyone was just a little bit wary of the defiant girl with no parents and a brain that did things it shouldn't. After Joshua was gone, it was even worse. Kids stayed away from her, as if her bad luck was catching. The few that dared to approach her were quickly scared away by her intelligence. Not to mention that making friends became difficult when you never stayed in the same place, with the same family, for more than a year. She had long learned to close herself off, not let herself get close to anyone, for fear that they would leave her or she would leave them. It was a recurring theme, people leaving, and she knew that it could, and would happen again.

So she had put up her walls and acted flippant, using sarcasm to cover up the fact that she really did care. Then Artie came into her life, and Pete, and Myka, and the glue holding her walls together had softened a little. The walls wobbled, but they didn't come down.

And then there was Steve. Just looking at him made her blurt out things that she'd never told to anyone, as if his mere presence was enough to make her spill all her secrets. She had never _liked_ him, not like that; even before she found out he was gay. But something about him made her feel calm. Safe. She would have trusted him with her life.

With that thought, a sickening feeling came into her stomach. He had died working as a double agent, trying to protect her and the rest of their Warehouse family from Sykes. He had died for her. All those weeks she had thought that he had betrayed them – he was trying to save them all. It was so very noble and so _typical _of him. She choked back a laugh. He had finally gotten to be a senior agent of the highest variety, working directly for the Regents and Mrs. Frederic. She wondered vaguely if this was his absurd, twisted revenge on her for gloating about being the senior agent.

She would stop at nothing to get him back. She would revive him and then she would slap him within an inch of his newly resurrected life for scaring her. Finally, after all these years of thinking she was unbreakable, someone had broken her. He broke her and made her walls tumble down and damn if she wasn't going to do something about that. She would bring him back – even if it meant sacrificing herself.


	6. Obsession

A/N: Phew. This one required research, including re-watching "Claudia", to make sure I wasn't getting any of the details wrong. And the artifact mentioned is King Midas' scepter, mentioned by Myka in the W13 tie-in comic book. Artie said it was in the Warehouse, or so the W13 wikia tells me. So I figured maybe Artie snagged it at some point.

* * *

She wasn't obsessed with the Warehouse. Not at first.

At first she was just obsessed with the mysterious professor who had shown up one day and taken Joshua away from her. She was convinced that if it hadn't been for him, Joshua would still be with her. Not _alive_ – because he wasn't dead. She was sure of that now. She wasn't crazy – in fact, she had never felt saner. She had a _purpose_, and that purpose was getting her brother back.

So she started with the name. Professor Artie Nielson. Luckily, it wasn't a common name, but she could find no info on a professor with that name affiliated with any college or university, in the United States or otherwise. Faced with a dead end, she changed her tactic, finding out everything about Rheticus and his compass that she could. She scoured the physics sections of bookstores and bought every book about Rheticus that she could find. She thought that maybe, just maybe, she could do it on her own, figure out Rheticus' experiment and bring Joshua back. How hard could it be?

A lot harder than she thought, it turned out. A lot of Rheticus' work was in Latin, and the only thing harder than Latin was _scientific_ Latin. Just looking at the words made her head hurt, and running them through a translation program took time, more time than she could afford. She knew, on some instinctive level, that her time was running out. It had been twelve years – how much longer could Joshua survive? How much longer could she?

It had been a complete accident that she discovered the Warehouse, late one night surfing a forum on paranormal activity. Those savvy in the underground networks of the Internet, who were patient enough to wade through the layers of spam and nonsense that formed the backbone of most search engine results, knew about Warehouse 13, of course. It was a longstanding Internet rumor, a legend about a mystical warehouse filled to the brim with artifacts with dangerous and thrilling powers. Someone had snapped a photo of a mysterious man holding a scepter. The sight alone was so unusual that it had apparently been photoworthy, but the town where the photo was taken had apparently been experiencing a record amount of lottery wins in the past month, with people waking up to find they had suddenly become billionares. After the mysterious man with the scepter had disappeared, the lottery wins dropped, and those who had won lost their money as quickly as they had come into it. The circumstances were fishy enough that it piqued Claudia's interest. But what really caught her attention was the photo that went along with the post. The photo showed a middle-aged man, turned slightly away from the camera. He was a little heavyset, and his hair curled wildly. The photo wasn't great quality, but Claudia downloaded the photo and touched it up just enough so that she could see his face. When she finally cleared it up enough, she nearly fell out of her chair in shock. The eyebrows alone gave it away. It was the very same man that had come to give Joshua the grant all those years ago. It was unmistakably, most definitely, Artie Nielson.

Someone had mentioned in the thread that the strange events could be the doing of Warehouse 13. It had been meant as a sort of inside nerd-joke, but Claudia took it seriously. After all, no one had believed that Joshua could get sucked inside an interdimensional rift, either. Who knew what was possible?

So she had turned to research with renewed vigor. She gathered any and every scrap of information about Warehouse 13 she could and put together the pieces. A structure that large had to have a massive amount of power going to it. So she hacked into the files of every electric company in the country. First, she calculated, state by state, how much electrical power a town that size would need. Then she compared her calculations to the actual amount of power going to each state and noted any significant discrepancies. That led her to South Dakota. The amount of power thatwas going to that state was nearly twice the amount it was supposed to be. From there, she narrowed her search – county by county, town by town. Once she had a rough estimate of where the Warehouse actually was, she was able to input latitude and longitude coordinates into a server to access the computer files. That in itself took about six months – the place was heavily protected with all manner of codes and passwords and firewalls. It was a hacker's dream. Eventually, she let herself get a little sloppy and Artie and his associates began to catch on that someone was snooping around in their files. But by that time, it hardly even mattered anymore. As soon as she was sure that Artie had done nothing in twelve years to even remotely help Joshua, she gathered up her supplies, threw them in her car (what did it matter that her license had expired while she was in the psych ward and she had been too hyper-focused on the Warehouse to renew it?) and drove to South Dakota.

And from there, the rest was history. She prided herself on that obsession, looking back. If she hadn't devoted herself to finding the Warehouse, she would have never found Artie again. She would have never freed Joshua, and she would never have found a permanent home and life passion in the Warehouse. She knew that her life could have taken a very different turn.

Sometimes, she thought, obsession paid off.


	7. Eternity

A/N: This is as close to a pure 100 word drabble as you're gonna get out of me. If you're a drabble purist, enjoy. Minor spoilers for "No Pain, No Gain". And a spoilery reference to the end of S3.

* * *

It occurred to her, after meeting Mrs. Frederic's grandson, that she could very well live into eternity.

She guessed the Caretaker gig came with immortality as a bonus, though nobody had exactly spelled that out for her. As long as the Warehouse was living, so was the Caretaker, unless something extraordinary happened.

She wondered how old Mrs. Frederic was. She resolved to never ask. It probably wouldn't turn out well.

Could she, realistically, handle that? Outliving everyone she'd ever cared about? Watching Artie and Josh and Myka and Pete and _Steve_, oh god, _Steve_, all die? She hadn't handled Steve's death's well the _first_ time around. Could she stand by and watch it happen again, and again, and again, to everyone who'd ever meant something to her?

All artifacts had a downside. It was only that night, lying in bed, unable to get the image of Mrs. Frederic's white-haired grandson out of her head, that she realized being Caretaker might have a downside, too.


End file.
